It has been announced during Facebook's F8 developer conference that chatbots on Facebook Messenger have led to increased sales. Facebook's Vice President of messaging products, David Marcus, said that “people prefer to use Messenger to interact with companies”; a statement that is supported by the fact that 80% of the 65 million businesses on Facebook use messaging to contact users. During his keynote speech, Marcus gave multiple examples of companies that have seen an increase in business following the implementation of a Facebook Messenger chatbot. For example, the cosmetic brand Sephora has seen an 11% increase in booking rates since launching the Sephora Reservation Assistant on Facebook Messenger. The hotel booking service SnapTravel was also mentioned, since users can only access the company through Messenger. There are currently 100,000 bots on the Facebook Messenger platform.Â
